


I Was Breaking Just to Raise You Up (from the grave of your mistakes)

by HidetheSilverware (alexa_dean)



Series: (New) VC missing chapters [4]
Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: 3rd chapter is all porn, Dubious Consent, Em-Dash Abuse, Fix-It, Gore, M/M, PWP, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, confession fic, homicidal and suicidal ideation, loustat is my otp, mentions of canon-compliant suicide attempts, my shade takes no prisoners
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-24 15:26:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21620143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexa_dean/pseuds/HidetheSilverware
Summary: Lestat sets the record straight by revisiting memories set inInterview with the Vampireand later addressing the misinformation inMerrick, Blackwood Farm,andBlood Canticle. Then Lestat has a minor freak out and Louis distracts him with sex.
Relationships: Lestat de Lioncourt/Louis de Pointe du Lac
Series: (New) VC missing chapters [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1234016
Comments: 18
Kudos: 93





	1. Preamble

**Author's Note:**

  * For [almostnever (Cesare)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cesare/gifts).



> Title from ' _Jekyll and Hide_ ' lyrics by Bishop Briggs.

Louis had raised the deadly snake of my interest by boisterously presenting himself-- unintentionally -- as nothing more than an opportunity for dinner and one-night-stand in one. I had felt at once a peculiar, inverted prescience, as one existing in a future recollection. The profound longing of a heartsick lover spilled over into my present from the nights which lay in waiting. I sensed that I already loved him. That he was already mine. That he would later leave me awash with the bittersweet resentment of true love, more than once. And I would be helpless to forgive him, more than once. And that he would turn out to be the biggest _I told you so_ of my eternity.  
  
Nothing could have prepared me for love so soon. The impact of Louis' emergence into my life had felt tenuously ominous: less fantasy than prophecy, less thought than brainy deity prepared for battle rising from my split skull. My eyes had sucked at the marrow of his very bones for details to compare with those of Nicki. I wove my silent parallels while pacing the shadowy perimeter of the Inn. He'd been (and still is) to my exacting taste and more: dark-haired, lithe, morbidly ironic, attractive -- I had to stop there because there was no reason to continue.  
  
In so doing, I'd found that the sucking chest wound Nicki's death dealt me had scarred over when I wasn't looking. And as much as Nicki had been a symbol of my youthful naivete, he also represented the death of my blind optimism. At least it was what I believed as I'd gazed out into a blighted world devoid of light. But it would not remain so. And I'd surmised that it had gathered its strength out of view, away from my knowledge, and thrust the ace in its sleeve before me, unexpectedly, in a cantankerous young planter. A youth bound to eclipse Nicki's memory entirely with little effort. Louis would later show a depth that Nicki had feigned (and feigned well), not that it stopped me from loving Nicki. But it certainly made it easier when intimidation was a nonentity between us.  
  
However, I had no such luck this time. His depth both emboldened and enchained me. I wanted his favorable regard more than anything, but I had not stopped to analyze it then because blazing before my inner eye was a deathbed vision of a series of amorous blunders and gropings and the false rudiments of friendship that had encompassed my romantic life. In three-dimensional reality, I had met my benighted imaginings come to light, and he was sublime. His hair was not merely dark, but black as sin, and his witchy eyes waxed with incalculable suffering. What can I say of his face that dozens of others have failed to capture; that I have been unable to capture? Such a face as to inspire the death of a hundred thousand flowers to petal-pulling inquiries. Life-altering questions to expire over, such as the ever-so-desperate: _does he love me?_ Or perhaps, _he loves me not?_  
  
Impossible to suppress the rising confidence brimming underneath my skin that we -- this _stranger_ and I -- were written in stars. Except the dipsomaniac was too shit-faced to share the moment with me. It would be the birth of a lighthearted rancor I would nurture well into the centuries to come with ironic fondness.  
  
I have to pat myself on the back here for recognizing in my leggy quarry the perfect equilibrium of two otherwise disparate entities: the beauty of the soul corresponding with the beauty of the body. Those with less discerning tastes and marginal intelligence had type-casted my wayward bridegroom incorrectly as tragically consumptive, notoriously unruly planter trash.  
  
To be fair, it had a great deal to do with Louis doing his damnedest to present himself as a perfidious pissant. True if not for his inimitable bone structure and striking complexion -- the hair, that skin, those eyes -- Louis might have eventually pressed someone beyond all patience to murder him (that wasn't me) and thus would've died a diamond in the raw, tempered by the oppression of grief and the heat of ungovernable passion, his brilliance left unfulfilled.  
  
It was none other than Lady Fortune herself that had Louis rise to his feet just as I had entered the public house. He'd leant over the round oak table with casual intimacy. His long, slender body fixed my attention both for its height and its shape. His head was as close as close could be without kissing his opponent outright, his wine-stained lips moving to say something I could not make out.  
  
Whatever it'd been, it did, however, earn him a resounding backhanded slap as loud as the crack of a whip. The whole of the hall froze, the gesture having done what nothing else could, quell the babel of tongues around them. All eyes on them.  
  
Monsieur _Wet Dream_ wasted no time in lunging over the table to deliver a crack to the nose of the offender, a bald, somewhat jovial-looking fellow whose one fault had been to choose Louis as an adversary. He'd not landed a single punch on his slim target. It had taken two large men to restrain Louis, whose hands had made it to the concussed player's neck, and then three to cart him off to the exit, tossing him out and refusing him entry when he menaced them. They'd addressed Louis by name, told him to sleep it off, and waved down a coach for him. From them, I'd gleaned some information: irregular regular who was acting out in response to some nameless tragedy. Louis' inebriated mind was in no sensible shape to explore. Louis dismissed the coachmen with expletives he'd learnt from pimps and sailors, no doubt.  
  
I absolutely had to follow if for no other reason than for entertainment. Mostly, it was that I'd been unlucky in love and had nothing to lose and no destination in sight aside from 'away from my ailing father.' And I suppose Louis' looks have always garnered him the wrong sort of attention.  
  
So this is how it went, not as I remember it, but as it happened. You won't get this sort of detail from Louis. I doubt he remembers anything. Louis went from inn to cabaret to inn. Attempted unwisely to escalate violence, which had hitherto varied only in degrees of failure. He taunted a cocky Spaniard from the colonies, a parsimonious Dutch slave trader, a merchant marine on leave; no man of noteworthy height or sizable build was safe from his choler.  
  
In a perfect world, any one of these men could have fulfilled Louis' death wish. However, Louis had underestimated his own ability to terrify people. He looked _unhinged_ and carried the air of caged unpredictability that did not ring of simple drink, but impotent anguish. It made one instantly uncomfortable to see it, and likely to look or walk the other way than confront it. There was no joy in kicking a man when he was so obviously broken and willing to lose everything. It had taken a brand of hard-to-come-by sadist. Unbeknownst to Louis, the two of us sought the same victim for separate reasons. He to inflict upon himself and me to inflict myself upon them. (I don't know what it says about me that I can walk around with an axe in my hand, and I may get a comment as to the direction of the woodpile. Give Louis the same axe and the ordinary item will take on a new life, a new seriousness beyond its original design. You might also have Armand and I checking our vehicles.)  
  
I want to dispel every one of the notions Louis is a soft-spoken, gentle lamb. He's a wolf in perpetual identity crisis, deceiving only himself. He cleans up well. Be that as it may, Louis had been a brawler when we met, which was a novelty I hadn't expected in someone with a face as fair as his. Oh, he had plenty of intellectual conceit I would later find out but had no sense of self-worth, no vanity whatsoever. It was a bizarre combination and exactly what I had not known I'd wanted in the redundancy that had become my immortality.  
  
Louis' comeliness had run contrary to the current trends of that age. Since then, it has collected infamous -- and I do mean it in a wicked sense -- renown in the present one.  
  
Under ordinary circumstances, beauty is a standalone virtue, existing to bring pleasure to the beholder, reminding them of the glory of God, and all that.  
  
Not so in Louis' case. His beauty elicits the hallmark affliction of life-altering vice. The impulse to possess it is ruinous. It has bankrupted souls of life, love, desire, the company of family and friends, of self-respect. And I know better than anyone. I'd paid the ultimate price. Forfeit the lives of others to cover the difference when my own had not been enough to pay the debt. Apropos of everything, I have yet to mention how difficult it is to quit Louis after the first taste and how easily he may quit you. You can give him a library full of first editions, eternal life, sire a child with him, and share the same household for sixty-five years, and still find yourself friend-zoned, which was only marginally less traumatic than being left for dead in a swamp.  
  
But to get back to the story, I observed Louis that night until he'd paused in his furious suicidal campaign to void his bladder. Can you imagine me, standing there in the barbaric filth of an alley, waiting patiently if jittery while my surly sweetie had taken the longest piss a racehorse would envy? It was too pathetic. It wasn't a perfect meeting place, but it had to do. I'd not been about to risk someone knifing Louis when I wasn't looking. God knows it only took him less than two hours to pull together three mortal enemies and a smitten vampire.  
  
He was exquisite. My darling degenerate had the look of someone who abhorred fancy dress or was unaccustomed to clothing. His full sleeves had been rolled up loosely and hurriedly, exposing smoothly muscled forearms and bony wrists. He pressed a long, bruise-knuckled hand in a splay against crumbling, rust-colored brick. Looking at him dead on, I admired the tapered _ensellure_ of his back, the seductive beck to his spine, its insouciant call for embrace to a motley assortment of greedy limbs. I felt strongly inclined to press my mouth to the lumbar pearls of his vertebrae, graze my teeth over the sacral beads, languidly pause between his nubile nates to have him beg for relief. And I would have to respond with my palms over his hips to keep him exactly as I'd wanted him and as open as my tongue would allow. There was no part of him I did not want to know acquaint myself with personally.  
  
His shirt and waistcoat gathered over the high prominence of his buttocks whose silhouette I'd only glimpsed in profile when he'd stretched like a sinuous cat over the card table. Still, it stirred the man in me as well as the vampire. Until that moment, I had not yet realized that I'd long lost pleasure in the kill. That blood had become sustenance and nothing more. But to look upon Louis, vital and vibrant, even as he gave a shiver before buttoning his breeches, I'd felt equal parts poet and pervert in every way.  
  
Insecurity had me straightening my velvet frock, tightening the silk ribbon in my hair, and feeling like my boots were screaming for a good buffing. I'd felt like a nervous date, so I busied myself with the business of phony nonchalance. He had no idea I lingered in the shadows. No inkling whatsoever that he was headed directly toward me, that our shoulders would collide as if by chance, by kismet, by the same forces that move the sun.  
  
When it did happen, his gait faltered, and he had to right himself by gripping tightly and frowning blearily into my adoring face, aligning our stars. He was as tall as I, or nearly so, which charmed me much to have everything so ideally within reach, all I would have to do is press forward to claim any part of him. His skin, on which I could not see any fuzz, glowed and glistened from the unseasonably warm air (November in New Orleans was a world apart from those in Auvergne). The smell of him was richer for the humidity. This close, the curves of his cheekbones were as high as my hopes and bright with color. His bony fingertips had dug into my shoulder, my hip gripped by the remaining others.  
  
All five senses under his spell, I was breathlessly in agony for him. I closed my eyes, overcome by the scent of his befoulment: salt and cedar and sex, and something green, vetiver. And of course, the expensive fragrance of sought-after breasts of just about every high-priced whore in the city. Hell, _he_ could have been a high-priced whore. I could hardly tell the difference with my eyes closed, and there was too much to appreciate to let them remain so. That racy watercolor blush staining his cheeks was as much from constant amorous attention as it was the fire of liquor, the slut. How deceived I was.  
  
Nodding, he mumbled something incomprehensible, perhaps thanking me for providing a solid surface to lean against or cursing me for blocking his path. Little did I know he could deliver either sentiment with habitual sangfroid, and I would be none the wiser.  
  
His eyes were a green I'd never seen in a mortal. There was no shift in hue as is expected -- golds, yellows, blues -- only the same summer-drenched shade of the same vivid color. A savage bloom in my garden, poisonous and exotic, and meant for me. (Centuries later, as though he'd glimpsed into my heart, Nikos Kazantzakis would then write: " _the doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical: both green, both beautiful._ " Clearly, he spoke of a Louis of his very own.)  
  
Before I'd thought of something pithy to say, Louis tapped my cheek with the self-same hand he'd used to piss with and launched himself away from my body like I'd been cast-off furniture or detritus, or something equally as unworthy of a double-take. The mortal injury he'd metaphysically delivered to my impregnable ego stole the air from my lungs. He was too beer-goggled to notice my dress and my face and my fabulous hair. Me? Lestat? Seventh son to a title I would never assume, having overcome my station in life with a genetic lottery of sculpted jawline, wicked pout, and a head full of blond curls. I’d known gropes and kisses at a precocious age. I attracted attention wherever I went.  
  
Uneducated as I was, the most I could have hoped for was to have become a kept boy to a pervy merchant, like Armand. Universally pretty, I would’ve never known what it was to give chase or ache for someone. But my mortal longings had been too abstract, too sophisticated for a title-less country boy with much to prove. My father and brothers taught me that brute strength had more value than perfect teeth; that books were worth more as kindling in a hearth in midwinter, than in my hands. And if I wanted to outlive my dogs, I would have to prove useful to the household. So it wasn't like I was some -- I'll quote Nabokov here -- _'humble hunchback abusing myself in the dark.'_

I wasn't simply a catch; I was _t_ _he_ Catch.  
  
Dear Reader, the details herein are absolutely necessary so that you may appreciate in full technicolor the fantastic irony of our predestined pairing. I present to you Exhibit A: Louis, at his most unsuitably drunk, nearly naked, waistcoat awry, having lost his cravat and frock, his hair in a panic of inky curls coming undone from its queue -- looking more pirate than planter -- blind from his cups, finding his way home by touch, or echolocation. Never reckoning that Exhibit B, the Vampire Lestat stalked him through rankly ammoniated alleyways, eye-twinkling, head-over-heels obsessed with him. Him being Louis. Him being a dirty, combative young man with all the sexpot appeal of a tavern whore, put here on Earth for me to torment and love at leisure, and the idiot trollop did not know it!  
  
In the haphazard crawl home, he'd managed to lose the leather tie in his hair. His waistcoat yawned open and draped cockeyed, down to its last button, having slipped off one shoulder completely, one stocking hung askew on his calf. His entire life was in turbulent flux, and he'd unknowingly given a lethal predator what was perhaps the slowest, sexiest half-assed striptease ever.  
  
By the time Louis had reached the brick steps to his townhouse door, patting himself down for keys and swaying oh-so-gently into the river-breeze, like it might bear him upright, I'd run the gamut of depraved fantasy, taking him in a million and one illegal and unnatural ways. Nevermind that my dick had no sexual function. It behaved much the same under patient, chafing stimulation. A _lot_ of stimulation. Never worth the attempt.  
  
It was like the first time I'd been fucked. I admit I'd been shamelessly drunk. Couldn't keep hard enough to ream Nicki like he'd wanted me to if my life depended on it, and no matter how formidable my semi had been, it'd been useless when confronted with an asshole. I'm certain Nicki had been angry with me for something or other, since the little shit (I mean it affectionately now) hadn't so much as offered me a reach around, even after I'd realized what it was I was missing by not exploring the avenue sooner.  
  
Mortal passion for a vampire is a bit like that. In that, the pleasure sought is hardly worth the effort it took to get there, and it would never culminate in release. One might have stroked my arm for all the excitement it would give me. I may be exaggerating some. Poor Nicki isn't here to defend himself. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that although the Kill is a hundred times that ecstasy, I could not fathom at the time, stopping at killing Louis. Let me rephrase: not only had I wanted to kill Louis, _I wanted to have mediocre sex with him_. Even as a vampire, when mediocrity is a choice. I had wanted to do nasty, unspeakable things to his body and then kill him and make him my husband, always.  
  
In the hallowed interval between too late and too early for the mentally sound, I'd lunged at Louis, immobilizing him. Slotting into place with an inaudible snick, like I'd belonged at his back, crowding him against the sturdy door, weathered but finely-built. Between wrought-iron posts supporting a balcony cascading with bougainvillea, ferns hung low in baskets from the arches. On either side of us, terracotta pots teemed with foliage forming an alcove composed of elephant ears and birds of paradise leaves as large as small children to conceal us from twilit eyes. He'd orchestrated his own crime scene, lain the props for his murderer.  
  
Slim as he is now, no one could've glimpsed him from the gas-lit streets with my body blocking the view. Not unless they'd looked harder, lower, and noticed a superfluous set of legs in white stockings, the third hand sprawled on the door. His every breath fogging the inset glass where his cheek was pressed, separating us from the domestic scene awaiting him inside, his ordinary life full of everyday fears.  
  
At the join between the long neck and graceful spine, he smelled of sandalwood; his hair tickled my nose, and his skin was soft as rose petals against my lips. I'd breathed him in deeply. He overflowed with sensuousness. His lean body replete with extraordinary self-possession belied only by the lethal recklessness I'd witnessed in his expression only a few hours before. I was at a loss. He was beautiful, successful, unmarried, and heartbreakingly young, yet he longed for death for reasons I only vaguely understood. The demise of his brother had been the straw, not the root. The war he waged was an old one. And he was as proud as he was self-destructive, as liable to offer his body up to a tropical storm as to the bloodthirsty Prince embracing him if it meant eternal rest. I did not know what to make of it all.  
  
With the steely aplomb of a madman, he'd said to me, his besotted assailer cum baffled lover: "What are you waiting for? Do it." And let his key fall from his hand, kicking it away for good measure. Louis had no idea what my intentions had been. I could've done anything, and he would've let me, that much I knew. Or thought I knew.  
  
I bit into his neck, and it was as if his entire being sighed, relinquishing its last breath to a bitter void, my body had become his sole anchor. Head full of music, I'd hummed to the beat of his heart and belabored breathing. A mockingbird sang blissfully somewhere, as unaware as I'd been to the sudden manifestation of love. All of it resonated deeply: one note that had made atoms dance like beads of water on a hot skillet. A crescendo of sound that had ceased to be sound but became a rumble in my bones and lightning in my limbs. The wet of desire, the heat of blood and air, and the man in my arms had coalesced into the same impenetrable order as the city itself. Wild and mysterious, full of emerald shadow and heavy moods, preferring encroaching wilderness to the frills of gentrification.  
  
I remember how gossamer-thin his linen shirt had felt, how his nipples hardened under my palms, and how wet my kiss sounded in the soggy autumnal night. How I'd lingered on exposed skin. Where it pebbled, and where it refused to over the hairless chest, the snare-drum tautness of his belly. I'd skirted fingers into his breeches, where I'd found him as full as he was foolhardy. His balls I'd soon learnt had been recently shaved -- no doubt from whoring -- and were beautifully suited to the cup of my hand. I hadn't cared who could have seen or heard. I'd claimed him, and I said as much, although it sounded more like a grunted 'mine' than the poetry his beauty deserved.  
  
Surprisingly sparrow-boned, even more so than I'd initially guessed, Louis was no less alluring than a man twice as robust. There remained an androgynous quality of a stripling in him. In the leanness of his body, the absence of shadow in the satin of his complexion. But the shape and length of his angular silhouette left no doubt that he was resolutely male and manifestly adult, even if the execution of him was painstakingly delicate. For there were incontestable bounties too: the mouth, the buttocks, the prominent cock in my hand. Not that it mattered or thought it ever would. But it satisfied the aesthete in me.  
  
Lightheaded, I giggled like a fool as I'd sucked from the wound in his neck, wholly hammered in moments; I kid you not. From within the home, I heard footsteps from the second floor, which startled me into releasing him. His blood coated my tongue. I'd swiped the back of my palm to my mouth. Sucked at my own lips for the remaining traces of his taste, my body aglow with fugitive heat. The male, woodsy musk of his skin on my hand. The rhythm of my respirations matched the hissing of his. I'd leaned with my back to the door, gathered the threads of my wits, and slit my eyes against him as though his beauty were something best meted out in doses.  
  
He had turned at the waist, head, and shoulders supinated. His heavy-lidded eyes had widened wise-owl wide from recognition. Even that was an effort for him. The flesh beneath bruised as I'd watched. His skin was so delicate I could see the fine-veined web of capillaries clear as those on a leaf.  
  
"Who are you?" he asked, gaze fixed on me, with a note of authority uncommon to young men, despondent young men. An implied, _why haven't you finished me off?_ threaded through like a negative mirror image.  
  
I'd crouched and touched the apple of his cheek with my thumb, proprietorially. He did not flinch.  
  
I clicked my tongue, "You will know soon enough. Do me a favor and remember nothing." My inhibitions were shot to pieces from his blood-alcohol level. I was in no shape to seduce anyone, least of all him. It's not every day one has to talk someone from a proverbial ledge. It's even less likely one has to convince said person that immortality is the answer to their mortal pain.  
  
"Sleep," I'd said, and he did, at once. He was less intimidating in repose but not my much. I took the sharp line of his jaw in my hand, smoothed the forelocks from his eyes, and tucked them behind his ears. There was something guarded about him even in slumber. Something brutally virginal in his poise, unattainable as grey-eyed Athena and as threatening as her strategic wroth. Nothing quickened my pulse faster than challenge.

And I'd been challenged.  



	2. Confession

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lestat sets the record straight by addressing the misinformation in Merrick, Blackwood Farm, and Blood Canticle.

There are a few things I need to come clean about. Not because I regret the choices which steered my quietly malefic machinations to their consequently lethal end, but because letting sleeping dogs lie is not my way, and I thought I’d be gainsaid by now. That and truth cannot be suppressed for very long. Lies have a habit of exacting their revenge on my ass.  
  
Besides, Louis deserves my honesty. I promised him as much, and I'm tired of making the same mistakes over and over, ad infinitum. It does worry me that not one person has questioned me over Quinn’s account of events in Blackwood Farm. And it's not for lack of trying. I've hinted loudly enough that I feel it’s ample time for a sordid, mostly sterile disclosure. A criminal confession without the salient details. It's unnecessary.  
  
The title ' _Vampire Chronicles_ ' is a misnomer. It presumes the author is documenting history for later generations. It does not stop to differentiate fact from fiction. It assumes, with Biblical arrogance, that nothing has been altered or omitted. For instance, the last few chapters of Merrick are almost utter fabrication. It has been purple-prosed to death, denied its unsightliness, the torment off camera.  
  
Let us start with my somnambulant, serendipitous stroll into the foul-smelling courtyard. The factual events surrounding Louis’ suicide were gag-ordered by yours truly. It was not David’s story to tell, and I would not have him piggyback off Louis' misfortune.  
  
If David had sought to extend his fifteen minutes of fame to sixty, I would have him do it like the rest of us, through seduction.  
  
I get it, as they say. The life of a serial murderer is lonely. I'd understood, to an extent, it has been harder for David to amass an audience. Louis and I are a tough act to follow, our shadows are long enough that even Armand was unable to launch David into the limelight. Cult followings don't happen overnight unless I start them. It's almost beyond anyone's control. One either clicks with mortals, or one doesn't. They are a capricious bunch. Occasionally my fans and Louis' will overlap, but for the most part, they're as divided as we are.  
  
Louis' base is learned, elitist, as wont to scour the aisles for Nabokov, Nietsche, and Nin as they would patronize neighborhood coffee shops over Starbucks, preferring Russian to Western Lit. Armand draws the moody artistes, the occasional Banksy, who has something controversial to say. Marius has a niche amongst classical historians. And that's as interesting as they get. Daniel, our beloved interviewer, is favored amongst the Hunter S. Thompson gang, wherein drugs, pornos and venereal diseases are traded like playing cards. Nicki, Antoine, and Sybelle have gathered the tortured instrumentalists, the unhappy bunch who would be martyrs to their craft and, if left to their own devices, would become precisely that.  
  
One will find my Stans at a Britney Spears concert just as easily as you'd find them at an Eminem concert. They're not a prejudiced bunch. It must hurt David that even my Mother, as little as she has contributed to said ' _Vampire Chronicles_ ,' has a niche: Lesbian eco-warriors.  
  
It's also hilariously ironic how similar Louis and my Mother are in the sense that their interior life is such that devoted crowds are a nuisance to them. I've seen them both deny their identity more than once at court to sidestep conversation. Since Marius had muralled the fuck out of the ceiling in the ballroom, however, they've gone to wearing oversized accessories to disguise anything that can be recognized. Chunky scarves, beanies, hoodies, ill-fitting everything.  
  
There wasn't much left for David to collect.  
  
Merrick, for all her gifts, physical and otherwise, had been David's link to a past when he'd been someone of consequence. His influence had reached persons on all levels of the Talamasca. Aside from having been director, he'd been a celebrity in their nerdy midst before I came into the picture. The sad ordeal with Merrick amounted to 'Lestat was gone, and he was lonely, and Merrick was a studious opportunist.' At any rate, I understood David's motives more than he did himself. But, I have yet to forgive him. I will, but I need a century or two to do it.  
  
Anyhow, I’m not altogether sure if I’m writing for an audience of thousands or an audience of two. I’m certainly not writing for entertainment, or money, or anything that might ordinarily motivate me. Plainly, I want Louis to know and consider the depth of my care. His consent is paramount in my mind, and it should be as informed as only I can make it. Because, as much as I’ve ignored it in the past, I’ve come to crave it in the absence. I can’t dream of proceeding without it. Likewise, I’m curious to test Louis' tolerance for bullshit, or if he’s as serious as I am about 'us' as the unofficial couple of the Not Dead Yet.  
  
As much conflict as Merrick's presence had caused me, Louis’ feelings for Merrick were less messy than I had anticipated. They were, however, mysterious in their blandness. Louis hadn't said much when I'd articulated the circumstances (lies) of her demise. In fact, he hadn’t said anything. He'd puffed a tiny sigh, which ruffled his forelocks, tucked said locks behind the high set of his elvish ears, and had went back to perusing the contents of Armand's library shelves. When he'd realized I hadn’t moved, because I was expecting, hoping, pining for the opportunity to console him, wanting him to leap into my trembling, lecherous arms, he'd said, steadily, offhandedly, not at all dejectedly: “Is that it?”  
  
Too stunned to show disappointment, I'd confirmed that yes, I had no more to say. To which, Louis had then answered, “Is David aware?” He'd turned his head, lashes sweeping up, then down and up again to study my face with no sense of concern for himself, rather like a doctor, then said, “He might need your company more than I.”  
  
And that'd been that.  
  
The official story was Merrick Mayfair, ill-begotten issue of Louis de Pointe du Lac, thirdborn of the infamously dashing Brat Prince, had rushed to the aid of her reformed aïeul and made a choice to sacrifice herself to release Quinn -- my then-current reported crush -- from the ghost of his unborn twin. A ridiculous right-wing ghost story created to bait Merrick so that I could murder her in cold blood and not have David intercede.  
  
For the record, I'd happily do it again. Although I would take it slow. Slower. Thus, I'd held Merrick Mayfair in the fire with my own two hands. Yes, I could have restrained her with good, old-fashioned telekinesis, but I wanted my hands dirty to the elbow. I craved to feel her soul leave her body, wanted to watch her blistering eyes dim and go out, if I'd earned a few blisters, it paled to the agony she'd caused me, years before, upon seeing Louis lying dead in his coffin having done what I could not do in the Gobi: conquered that infallible instinct for survival. And that doesn't account for the near year it took to rehabilitate him.  
  
Merrick had a direct effect on Louis' choice to go through with what he'd planned for the better portion of six months, and to a lesser degree, so did David. The two of them had staged a séance knowing full well there was no guarantee of the identity of the entity who would assume Claudia's shape at Louis' expense. They could have denied the request. They didn't. And so Louis had taken his life.  
  
He'd done so peacefully, if not disrespectfully. It'd been a chilling crime scene to disrupt. Deceptively gentle Louis had lain as if in slumber as if he hadn’t suffered third-degree burns, head-to-toe, as if he hadn’t cooked through an entire New Orleans Summer day. Not once having screamed. Not once have tried to find shelter in the earth. There had been no rips in the satin, no scratches in the wood, no twisting of the body to cover itself. Only an unbearable, stoic resignation.  
  
If not for the length of the skeleton, I would have sworn the corpse had been a child’s. Muscle had atrophied in the heat, the skin had shrink-wrapped to the shape of his bones like melted plastic. His lips, lips which I had kissed in fury and in joy, had withered away into the serene grimace of an anatomical skull. With the destruction of hair follicles, the black strands had scattered in the wind, lost somewhere in the grass, the myrtles, the honeysuckle. The magic of Louis: his beauty, his intellect, his compassion, his diffidence had been immolated. Louis was no longer my conscience, no longer my lover, my executioner, nor the soft voice of reason in the dark.  
  
I remember caging a scream in my chest. I might have knocked David and Merrick over getting at Louis. I remember my knees hitting tree roots beside his coffin and thinking Louis was no longer Louis. An agony unlike any I'd ever experienced clenched my bones like an aching fever. It was that helpless panic I felt when Claudia had been executed without the foreknowledge, which made it worse. I had no preparation.  
  
There'd been no conscious decision. If there were consequences, I'd address them when and if they manifested. I'd poured my blood over the charred corpse in the coffin. I had been of two minds, part of me didn't care that what I sought to do could raise a mindless revenant, and the other despised me for it. Out of guilt or fear, Merrick and David joined my efforts.  
  
It takes a monster to behold the wraith of his beloved reduced to a spectacle of animal compulsion, which read much the same as demon possession and deny him leave. Mute, the revenant had Louis' shape and the pale ghost of his mannerisms, but it was not Louis. Its eyes had taken on the lambent sheen of a devil, its hair had grown back in coiled black serpents. It would often snap its teeth in the air like a dog because its hind-brain recognized only threat and not much else. But hope had been a slow-acting poison as green as arsenic, as green as my lover's eyes, and I'd been a dreadfully morbid romantic.  
  
Frequently, I fantasized executing a murder-suicide, but couldn't make it work so that we'd go out together as one. In tandem would not do. It would be together or not at all. As a consequence, resentment ate me alive as I reenacted the gruesome ritual of asphyxiating Louis to blackout, allowing no blood flow to his brain, followed by force-feeding him from my wrist. When it -- he had grown well enough to ambulate unassisted, he would stagger from one end of the flat to the other in a rampage of destruction until I'd been forced to subdue him, by any and all means. This ignobly included Maharet’s braids, a *Hojōjutsu* manual, and a disgraced lover at the literal and figurative end of his rope.  
  
Each milestone -- gross motor skills, fine motor skills, problem-solving -- had presented to me a new dilemma. I'd learned that a vampire with the understanding of a two-year-old child held the ability to wreak havoc in two nights than I did in two centuries. Privately, we'd celebrated gains with increasingly intricate binds, and knots a Boatswain’s mate would be proud of. By the end of Louis' recovery, he'd passed through shibari 101 with flying colors and no recollection of it. No small amount of time has passed since and, I have yet to look at Macrame art without experiencing an ill-begotten hard-on and sizable guilt to match.  
  
These small victories had come at the weighty cost of everything, which made Louis, my Louis. The restraints were as damaging to his psyche, as my unrelenting, heliotropic fussing. Unwittingly I'd fashioned a marionette from the pretty dregs of my lover: vacant, pliable, soulless.  
  
Maddened quite possibly with cabin fever, or solely with grief, I became violent toward him. I was convinced his muteness and listlessness was meant as an insult. That he hated me for infusing him with my blood. I took victims, three to four a night, to feed him. Nothing went into him that hadn't gone through me, literally.  
  
It led me to say and do despicable things, not for him, but to him, to get a rise out of him. To get anything except that mild, vapid stare. Unforgivable, shameful all of it. Yes, I'd done abominable, evil things for him: to seduce him, to keep him, and to forget him. But I'd never taken things as personally as I did his suicide and the subsequent silence. Even when he'd wrung his hands and stood fast as Claudia bled me like a sow.  
  
I'll let you in on a little secret. Louis omitted plenty from his interview, but he did not lie in the details. Frequently, I would threaten his life but would settle on taking it from the next pretty thing that scampered by. It's only in hindsight that I'd realized Louis never had reason to doubt me. That I'd been a stranger, who had murdered him and was therefore capable of anything. Our life was a brutal satire, and I never considered how fragile Louis' self-esteem had been.  
  
You see, Louis was never as inconsequential as he believed and still carries himself to be; has never been anything less than my vulnerable, inexhaustible heart. From the very beginning -- I knew -- in a rare moment of crystalline clairvoyance -- I knew -- I'd met Fate in this defiant, desperate, noisy creature, as spare as a figment of my imagination, and as remarkable as a lightning strike in the shape of a man. Louis had been a revelation of divinity on Earth and a premonition of impending doom, attracting no one's attention more acutely than that of a vampire's. What I took for desire could very well have been terror. It was the self-same rush of pure adrenaline I experienced with the wolves.  
  
I did not balk. Not then and not later. And who would I be if not a fount of boundless, unmerited swagger? Okay, so mostly dumb luck and an absurd inability to accept defeat more out of habit than conscientious choice. I can no more help being at the pinnacle of conflict and drama than Louis can slip under storms of self-doubt. Can no more be as sharply dressed as Louis looks freshly fucked, his clothing askew, hair matted in damp curlicues to his cheeks. Granted, I'd been the devil that besieged him the moment a back was turned or a door was closed. Yet Louis persists, dignified and unmoved, in rumpled fabric and unruly hair and thoroughly ravaged mouth, which has only ever served to galvanize greater heights of audacity in me.  
  
These are the chthonic forces that bind us, eternal. I wouldn't have been able to bring Louis back from the brink of oblivion if it wasn't so. And I would have died at Claudia's hand in the festering swamp. I feel it in the marrow of my oft desecrated bones. I feel that indefinable tug at my core like a magnet, and so does Louis. Surely, it must be a matter of quantum physics. Protons and electrons searching each other out, pairing up and clustering together in spinning, vibrating intangible webs.  
  
Why else would I have awoken at the pivotal moment to raise Louis like Lazarus if not for his soul calling out to mine from the Aether where I'd been lost for years? Why else would Louis and I agree to cohabit with as much bad blood as we have between us? How can there be a destiny with no god?  
  
But who am I kidding? The sex is ridiculous. Not only better than two bloodthirsty fiends deserve but the devastatingly addictive stuff of legend. Concrete proof there is no God dispensing justice in the world, and that Fate favors villains.  
  
Anyway, one of the best things to come from Louis’ death-adjacent experience is that the repeated infusions of my powerful blood have conveniently razed the playing field. David and Merrick had failed the final cut by design. No longer privy to Louis’ thoughts. I, for once having the sole benefit of centuries-long experience contemplating the tell in Louis' otherwise perfect poker face.  
  
Killing Merrick had been the apotheosis of my hypocrisy. I've said it before, she hadn't done anything the rest of us vampires weren't already guilty of, rape and murder by coercion, deceitful pretense. But I would not, could not suffer the witch to find her way underneath Louis' skin again. She had no loyalties. Not even to David.  
  
It was as if Fortune smiled on me by presenting me with Quinn and Mona, all but landed them into my lap. We bargained, and for a few pints of my blood, I'd gained an accomplice in murder and an obnoxious Trojan horse to park on the lawn of the Mayfair clan. I wasn't too keen on genocide, but I would kill when pressed. If Merrick, a fringe-element cousin, was able to bamboozle not only Louis but David -- whose strength could match mine -- what would the coven mistress of the Mayfairs be capable of?  
  
Frankly, a lot. But it wasn't in Rowan to deceive. She'd lost her taste for it. She had shattered under the weight of her secrets. For a short while, I played the Prince on the steed, her patron saint because I could not be Louis'. I'd failed Louis so disastrously that I could not imagine being useful to anyone. Fear that my blind selfishness would consume yet another innocent (innocent relative to me) I clung to my role until I recovered my confidence. We parted on happy terms.  
  
But it had not mattered, because by then, Louis had moved on. Had gone on to live with Armand. I'd hoped to abscond with Louis like a vile brute, because I could not bring myself to ask to be taken back, could not survive the rejection, would rather deny him the choice. I didn't. Obviously. Our reunion was nothing like it had been in Carmel Valley.  
  
_Have you come back to me, as they say?_  
  
 _You've come back to me, Lestat._  
  
No embrace, hardly a greeting. Louis looked at peace, dare I say, even happy at Trinity Gate. He was rightfully prickly with me. I'd hurt him when I left him. This was no mystery. He'd rung my cell more times than I could count that first week. Left two or three succinct voicemails the second. Something to the effect of: Where are you? When are you coming back? Why did you go? Heart between my clenched teeth, I'd let it ring, in agony. Refusing to touch my phone for fear of breaking down.  
  
It had been too much like living with the ghost of someone I'd killed. Did kill. As ever as always, I wanted Louis more than anything. Wanted him desperately, ruefully, indeed involuntarily. But, more than that, I'd needed Louis to want me back. How could he if he had no choice? Mind you, he'd never resisted me in the end, after it became apparent he had no physical need for my blood. But, I had so little joy left in me then that try as I might, I could not give it up. However, it did not escape my notice that he never once instigated intimacy either.  
  
Seemingly empty of memory, I'd become everything Louis knew of the world. Yet Louis had been -- was, is, forever will be -- everything to me. Such was my conundrum. Heartsick, I'd wanted us both dead. The alternative had been to flee, and so I did. I'd stayed away and kept staying until I did not know how to stop. I learned to busy myself with the business of love in exchange for sips of the river Lethe. Little did I expect to find Louis stowed away there in the memories of others.  
  
Eventually, I sent a letter, like a true coward, for no other reason than I could not bring myself to tell the truth. Nor could I think of a good lie either. It took me three weeks and two nights' worth of deliberation with my reflection to come up with the most basic trite shit I'm writhing from embarrassment bringing up. I'm a published author, and all I could come up with was that we needed time apart, that I did not know when I'd be back, and he was more than welcome to stay at Rue Royale. No forwarding address. Instructions how he might reach me through my attorney. I shit you not, I did that to him. In my defense, I did not think he would know to care.  
  
Ten small eternities -- a year before Amel's awakening -- had separated Louis and I when I'd finally mustered the emotional wherewithal not so much to deliver bad news, years late, of Merrick, but to present myself for judgment before Louis. It warmed and relieved me to see my fears were unfounded. I'd been impatient, and because I had no one to draw experience from, doubt had eroded what fragile hope I wasn't aware I'd harbored until it had gone. I'd been afraid that Louis would never recover the memories of us from before.  
  
Ladies and gentlemen, I behaved. Me! The model boy scout. Kept all four limbs to myself, even as Louis wandered into my orbit, close enough to collide (or had I wandered into his?). A satellite moon, a thawing comet. Heavenly body to heavenly body.  
  
Hindered by shame, silenced by regret, I could do nothing. Would Louis have scrambled away if I had reached for him? I wanted to say I had no excuses. That it was cowardice. That it has always been cowardice with me. I'd left because I was an insufferable coward. See? See me, cowardly, cowering, but attempting to change. Returning and turning a new leaf.  
  
I'd abandoned Louis. He had not deserted me, as I have claimed. I lied. I alone had knowledge of what I'd done. That much was evident.  
  
"I'm sorry," wasn't enough. Louis had rendered me clumsy and quiet, what seductive grace remained to my name, what controlled gentleness fell away to expose the wound of something soul-deep and wordless. An infinite darkness of feeling, of slumbering possibility secured by the mutual conceit that we were foxhole brothers. Bound through trauma. Or was it infernal love?  
  
I had no idea what to say to Louis. Just when I’d thought I'd come to an understanding, I found that there was yet more to learn because Louis' mind was like a spiral shell, labyrinthine, and his soul hides just out of sight around the next curve, beyond my grasp. And I was no Theseus. I had no magic thread.  
  
He'd dismissed me. Politely. And it was through that wound that Amel would later enter my life.


	3. Love Song

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm done, son.

“We could switch positions,” Louis says, wriggling like a fitful child, his face half in shadow, voice pitched night-fall soft. Like it’s nothing. Like we’ve done it before, and I haven’t turned him down. Like he’s the sensitive, good boyfriend doing me a favor, and I’m the overeager chump with too much testosterone and a reputation to uphold. Both of which are true, but it’s never the point. You see, my lover thinks he’s sly. Slyer than I am, even.

As smart as Louis is, and as often as I play second fiddle to the cryptic contents of his idle brain, one would think we’d meet in the middle. That after a time, we might approach homeostasis, even if a bit uneasily. However, Louis steadfastly clings to his frumpy-sweatered underclassman stereotype to perpetuate the myth of his obliviousness. But my lover is anything but that, and he knows that I know.

Louis and I have History together (with a capital H), for better and for worse. It gets in the way of things when it isn't driving us; compelling our motivations, actions, emotions. It looms, elephantine, like an ill-behaved storybook monster. We acknowledge it by name, but won't address it directly. Nonetheless, it rears its misshapen head during sex, and it takes sides. Right now, it's in my corner. So, I’m not in the slightest bit inclined to confirm the suspicion that Louis' distinctly magnificent cock -- straighter than the arrow he’d stuck into the meat of my heart -- is just one more way he is the bigger, better man. And I am ‘ _that guy_ ,’ coming in second best to ' _my guy_.' _The Vampire Lestat_ to his _Interview with the Vampire_ , wildly popular by far. But without literary gravitas. Merits of style be damned.

Too, there is a more significant issue at play, that of Louis' inexperience. I would never allow my Louis -- ignorant of the arts of seduction, whose mortal sexual history consisted of the loveliest brides-for-hire paid handsomely for discretion and the ability to vanish quickly without exchanging a single word, and sadistic men whose passion for debasement matched Louis’ capacity for self-loathing -- to plunder my ass. I’m under no delusions, and I lack both Louis’ tendency to self-destruct and his high threshold for pain. To speak truth, I'm not against receiving dick, as a whole -- I've enjoyed my fair share of encounters in my mortal life -- I'm only against receiving it from Louis specifically.

But more than prevaricating, what excites me to mouth-breathing, teeth-gnashing, lip-smacking, cock-cupping, blue-balling distraction is the _experience of Louis succumbing to my desire_. The explosive rush of triumph is as satisfying as the flush of orgasm itself. Oh, I would gladly worship the vestal constriction of his _trou-de-cul_ forever if he’d allow it. Would ignite votive candles around our conjugal bed nightly. Sure, he may feel like he’s little more than glorified pornography at this point, but who wouldn’t want to be treated as such by their Prince? And it’s not like his body doesn’t respond favorably. Usually. Most of the time. Unlike now, because with as little reciprocal ardor as Louis is giving me at the moment, I might as well have toppled over him or groped him in the subway.

“There is always later, tonight,” Louis offers in a husky, soporific voice. Languid and testy as an animal roused from hibernation, he wears the face of fitful sleep more beautifully than anyone has any right to. He white knuckles the serenity from his eyes and replaces it with a poorly concealed scowl.

One-half hour less, and I’d have a mutiny on my hands. As it is, released from my inauspiciously libidinous clutches, Louis is braced on his elbows, enclosed on all sides by a soft scatter of bed pillows. Squinting at me as though my needs are not valid grounds to commit to consciousness, in flagrant disregard to the basic fact that I happen to be his One True Love in agony for desire of him.

“We wouldn’t have to rush if we wait,” Louis adds like the air isn’t ozone-sweet with sexual tension, and he’s not scrupulously snubbing the flaming memo tacked to my aching dick.

There is nothing to keep me from taking care of it myself, per se, but Louis slept in _my_ bed (he rarely does this, which is indicative of something), bare ass pressed to my luxury cotton sheets over my five-digit-long-price-tagged mattress in my custom full-tester bed, breathing my cedar and pine-scented air, refusing to be mine. The nerve on him has no shame whatsoever. One would think his balls were bulletproof.

“You’ve had two consecutive headaches this week,” I remind him, frustratedly rolling away to plop onto my back. “I refuse to leave it to chance. At this rate, we'll be penciling sex into our monthly agenda like a mortal couple ten years into their marriage. I refuse to be average. So if you’re amenable to fucking, do me a favor and relax. It's not like I expect you to do all the work.” I'm also unused to being pushed aside in favor of sleep, but if I can stoke the fires of frolicking lesbians living in caves, then Louis should be No Big Deal. Like so much of him, this is one more way I'm wrong.

Louis has never forced me to grovel for the privilege of his company, but it damn well feels like he has. And the warmth welling up at the sight of his tangly, sleep-tousled hair and severe expression is emasculating. It’s also immeasurably challenging to hold onto any ill will for any length of time when one is about to fuck a _Monsieur de Pointe du Lac_ , whose legs were rumored to open once in a blue moon and not without a wallop of sorcery. Or the sort of black magic I carry below the belt.

“Louis,” I drawl, drawing close, “Louis, don’t be cruel,” and press the hard length of my body flush against his side, my palm to the dip of his stomach, my thigh climbing up over his lap. I lick the salt from his throat. "Love me back." He sighs a little. "I'm languishing without your love," I try for humor.

But Louis makes no movement, no comment, despite the fact his dick is stretched to raw, rosy fullness, glans exposed to the rushlight without any need to pull the foreskin back. Its length jumps ever so slightly to the beat of his heart, more so when I whisper into his ear. Sweat shines over the white of his unmarked skin in a silvery pink halo, a second opalescent subluminary.

“Twice, Louis,” I point out when he refuses to return my caresses. You’ve turned me down _twice_." I thrust two fingers into the empty air above me for emphasis. "You're trampling over my self-esteem."

"You'll recover."

The wretched pittance of affection Louis affords me currently is only marginally less insulting than the wad of cash he would slip into my surtout pocket when we’d lived together as husbands through the better part of the 19th century. As many times as I’ve dragged Louis by the scruff of the neck back from amongst the dead (more times than an alley cat would be afforded, mind you), one would think it might grant me special privileges. It doesn’t.

“I propose we set a time limit for council meetings -- or you should,” Louis says, apropos of nothing like we’ve been bargaining this entire time. “You’re the Crown Prince. It should count for something.”

“Are you--” My mind short circuits from disbelief. The question becomes entangled in the curls at Louis' nape.

“You can arrange for someone to transcribe the conversation for me,” Louis continues, smiling with a remarkable amount of detachment for someone as fit to fuck as he is in my hand. “We should be doing it anyway and not simply for posterity. As far as I’m concerned, your council of elders are about as trustworthy as a murder of politicians.”

“You really are,” I say, following my thought to its conclusion and feeling my eyebrows disappear into my hairline. “Dickering with me-- You’re really dickering with me.”

“ _Negotiating_.”

“Blackmail!”

“I don’t recall giving you an ultimatum. Proposing it now is as good as any while I have your full attention.”

“If I have to sit through it. You have to sit through it.”

“Marius is your mentor,” Louis says, breathless, but stubbornly undeterred to have his way. “Not mine. As for the rest, they're there at your request. They may be older by far, but you're the one with influence over the majority of our population. It would do you well to remember they're reliant on you to control the masses. You've done what they could not in six centuries.”

“You have an odd way of flattering me,” I say, petulantly into his upturned face, the rosy flush to his pale cheeks. "You're embarrassingly bad at it. Nearly as bad as Amel. Did you know he called me a slut out of left field with no context? I swear it had to have been Tourette's."

"A slut is a slut. One doesn't need context, and you're ignoring me again."

"Yes to the former. Amel had the perfect opportunity to call me names when I kissed Magnus' ghost."

"Don't remind me. What were you thinking? Nevermind. Listen--"

"Oh, I'm listening. I'm handpicking what I choose to entertain," I say, taking in Louis' glassy eyes before closing my mouth over a ruddy nipple, sucking it to peak hardness, before working the other over with the flat of my tongue. "But if you must know, I had to prove to myself that Magnus has no hold on me. That what fear he may have inspired is gone. And I wanted him to know it too," I say then roll his nipple between my teeth.

"I'm upset _for_ you," he gasps. "He took you against your will. He's no maker. At best, he's your rapist. At worst -- in fact -- that monster is your murderer."

"I'm _your_ murderer," I remind him.

"Yes, but I _asked_ to be murdered."

"You changed your mind."

"It's not the same."

My heart swells. It's perhaps the most romantic thing Louis has unknowingly said to me.

"I'm waiting for you to agree to have bad, nasty sex with me," I say, reaching for the heft of his cock, finding it wet at the tip with enough balm to soothe my wounded pride. I pump him once, glans to root, and he hisses in response.

“Too much,” Louis protests. “It’s too sensitive,” he appends as if he would indeed have it otherwise.

“Here?” I tease, closing a hand over his scrotum, lifting it, pressing it against the shaft so that I could encircle them both at the base like a cock ring. “Too sensitive, where? here?” I run a thumb over the slippery crown. Louis attempts to curl in on himself, but I won't let him. Teasing Louis is an addictive pastime.

“Yes,” Louis says, quietly trembling with everything he refuses to give voice to. Then more vehemently: “Yes, you know it is.”

In life, I’d built the foundation of my sexual confidence around obscene moans and well-meant screams of delight. Louis is in the habit of doing neither. Oh, Louis flings plenty of condemnations in my direction, but never as a result of an orgasm or its approach. You can be sure Louis does this intentionally. He's secretive in all things including this: the experience of pleasure.

One can imagine my confusion. I felt I was doing something wrong. Louis was nothing at all like Viktor's mother (other than in the obvious way). And I’d banked on Louis being a screamer, because hello, you know what is said about the quiet ones. Trust me to have found the exception.

It took a minute to realize that Louis’ rapture is revealed in the body language he has no control over -- the liquid of the eyes, the shudders and trembles, the speed of his breathing. In the cut-off noises the animal flare of his nostrils, the ruffle of shoulders shaking off a shiver. The better the sex, the less he has to say, and the more inclined he is to hurt me with his teeth or his nails, or his hair pulling. Which is why I can’t stop with the running commentary. As long as Louis has the wherewithal to answer me, he’s not where I want him to be, which is helpless with ecstasy.

To complicate matters, Louis is also notoriously hard to please, doesn’t want to be owned or spanked, or made to beg or end every response with ‘ _master_ ,’ ‘ _sir_ ,’ or ‘ _please_.’ Instead, Louis expects to be thrown around some. Hurt. Disregarded. Wants the bondage without the equipment. Wants the fight with no fists. Wants relief without responsibility, all the while keeping the appearance of sinless impassivity.

Don't be led on, Louis can stop the sexual proceedings at any time. He has my strength, though he rarely uses it. In fact, I’ve given him so much of me that his flesh shouldn’t be as pliant or elastic as it is. But it is, without a doubt. Defies all expectation in ways only my fledglings appear to be able to. I should be envious of its obscenely human softness, its youthful-looking translucence, but as frequently as I find myself embraced by it, I feel Louis is already an extension of my being. It would make about as much sense as a limb resenting another its proximity to the heart.

Embarrassed by his interest in sex, Louis represses it to nonexistence outside of our trysts. Would have the world believe he’s moved beyond the lowly matters of the flesh, although Fareed’s injections are no longer a secret, nor are they as life-altering as the original trial run had been. Louis would have me perpetuate the ruse that he and I are above mortal passions. I'm firmly in the opposite camp: fucking elated to revisit the lustful days of my mortal youth, when not every meaningful intimacy ended in death or pregnancy.

"Do you find me repulsive? You shouldn't hold things in. It's bad for your health." I lick the skin behind his ear, run my teeth over his pulse, jacking him slowly in my hand, slow enough to seem unintentional, feeling my way around the veins beneath the silk. His head rolls back. Evading me in his own way by hiding the nuances of fire and ice, I would undoubtedly see in his thoughtful expression. "There must be something to dislike. You make sex seem like a chore," I say, exaggerating a little. What I really mean to say in Lestat-speak is that I would like his libido and my libido to hold hands or, better yet, make a show of holding hands, in the ballroom, the conference room table, my desk, his desk, my vehicle of choice, in front of Armand so I can rub it in his imp face.

But I would settle for what I crave most: Louis' undivided attention. Attention is worth more when it's earned, and Louis, whether intended or not, makes me earn my share of it. I’m forever tripping over my own feet to keep that keen, surreptitious gaze on me. Embarrassments abound. There is an exceptional quality to Louis' face, intensified by the felid shape of his eyes, the glimpse of the sleeping menace hidden beneath the carefully constructed gentleman everyone thinks they know but is bound to misunderstand.

Louis is a construct. And the connection one feels? It has nothing to do with genuine sentiment but everything with the delusional projection of aspiring lovers high on hope-hash, horny goat weed and the opportunity of a lifetime or two. Don’t believe me? Ask Armand. You see, Armand would never have been able to secure Louis’ good graces were it not for his ability to peer into Louis’ mind. Otherwise, he would have found himself having to justify an existence between Louis’ thighs just as I do, fumbling clichés. Badly. Or closer to the truth, having to manipulate Louis between his own thirsty ones.

I never had the advantage, my influence over Louis ended the night I took his mortal life. No way to predict that Louis was the rarest of men. The sort that would listen to you with his whole heart without expecting compensation for his time. How was I supposed to know he was interested in me and not in my pointy pearly whites? That he didn’t want me in his pants, or his coffin? Or that he didn’t suspect that men didn’t cease to be men because they became vampires, and I was precisely the sort who anticipated a sexy reward for my thoughtfulness. Louis’ passions were cerebral, first and foremost, and carnal only by happenstance. You can see why our early years together were rough.

I groan, hot from the thought of my blood circulating inside his body, filling the deepest recesses, witnessing hidden-most secrets, flooding his softly radiant skin like a tide or a song, with all the love and devotion I could ever hope to give him. I bite down, widening my mouth to receive the gentle, flexing swell of his pectoral muscle, the warmth of blood. My fingers travel hastily along his spine to the fractious tightness waiting between his unsuspecting buttocks. But this too is bliss: the involuntary tremors, the indignance, the push and pull of his young-seeming limbs, and breakneck beat of his everlasting heart. It has all the hallmarks of a kill, just shy of death. And it’s delicious.

Louis pitches his voice low, "You know that's not it," he says to me as he attempts to push my grabby hands away from his lap, both helpless creature and icy beauty. This is precisely what I mean with Louis. He says one thing and does another. "You drive me mad."

"It would do you well to remember it,” I say, triumphant, my smile communicating all the ways I wish to have him: with lusty kisses, and dips of my fingers and dick inside him, my name shouted for all and sundry to hear. None of it is likely to happen, but I want it anyway.

“Relax,” I tell him, pushing him back onto the sheets, vowels trailing. Palm sliding over his navel, a tiny, negligible half-moon, smooth skin pink with sweat. His stomach jerks and a hand flies over his mouth -- knuckles to lips -- obstructing an involuntary sound. He’s narrowest there, just above the hip-bones, the muscles in relief like he’s stepped into a catsuit two sizes too small; all arms and legs and that uncanny symmetry like he’d been conceived in space like the most perfect ball bearing. “Give me control.”

“I don’t think you realize how hard that is for me,” Louis says, tense, muscles twitching with adrenaline. The steely length of his thighs quiver with an ambivalence his treacherous, foxfire eyes are unable to hide. The delight that fills me is perverse, schadenfreude at its peak. My sole consolation is witnessing Louis’ typically indifferent demeanor falter as aggrieved as I to find himself enslaved by the monstrously debilitating libido I’d unexpectedly inflicted upon us.

“Try,” I say. “Open up.”

Scarcely able to tolerate my dissatisfied hands, he allows his knees to fall away from his body, allowing me to settle between them. His cock, a substantial, velvet weight in my hand, sheened with the first few drops of his desire. What I want is a languid in-and-out, like I have no place to be. If nothing else, what I get is quick and a little violent, which is more Louis’ preference than mine.

“It can’t be all that bad,” I say smirking, and stroking thumb and forefinger along the length, and over the bright pink corona. Moisture collects in the slit from the attention of my fingers against a hole as self-effacing and hard-to-please as its master.

His hands twitch in the bunched pillows strewn above his head, tangle in tresses deep and dark as night country, reflecting an internal conflict I can only guess at. And in so imagining come to the inevitable conclusion, it's shit. I press my mouth to the slender reed of Louis’ clavicle, following its shape to its apex, pushing against the skin of a capped shoulder. Cut through the flesh with my teeth, whetting my appetite with a small, sweet swill of blood, and lick it closed. “You were made for this.”

“You would say that,” he mutters, words belied by a rolling, mindless squirm, spine arching into his surrender, his dick surging into my fist, twitching and anticipating the downstroke of a too-tight, too-fast grip. I hold off, wanting Louis to do the work, wanting to watch him fall apart: chase his climax within the circle of my fingers around his cock.

“I know your body, Louis. Intimately. Like no one else. You can’t deny it,” I say, nuzzling his neck, his cheek, reacquainting myself with the exact geometry of his jaw, the narrow chin. “I know the curve and flex of it under pressure, where you keep your tension and how to release it.”

“Again, you're making assumptions,” Louis says quietly. I almost miss the silver thread of defiance, leading me into another dispute. But Louis is naked, and so am I. Things can be better, but they’re certainly not bad when I’m staring at Louis’ rosy nipple poking stiffly in the space between my finger and thumb. Only the gentlest rise of muscle in the narrow chest.

It’s not easy holding off hunger of differing etiologies, and I tremble from the adrenaline of it, peppering the avian span of Louis' slender shoulders with vindictive kisses and unsaid words of praise (beautiful), instruction (let go, keep going), and encouragement (find your pleasure, that’s it). I would argue with Louis, but there is no point. He can easily inspire doubt with words, but all I have to do is touch him to know he’s omitting the truth. As elegant and impervious, when clothed, Louis is intimidating when naked. He’s careless with his body in passion, yields to me when I should yield to him, swallows his pride as I swallow his dick, offers the silk of his inner thighs and ass despite his immediate inclination not to.

He presses his lips to the throb below my ear, tugging my hair viciously with a hand I didn’t see coming, and settles his small teeth on the juncture of my neck and shoulder; licking a long, teasing line of nothing.

A shimmer-like heat passes through me as a minor struggle occurs. A mad dash for limbs and shadowy pink places ending with my tongue in Louis' mouth and his wrists in my hands and my demented dick conveniently aligned in a fraught moment rife with potential. There’s a bead of moisture on the tip of his dick clinging to life, but it’s not consent. He’d never beg me to fuck him, but he will order me to do it. Meanwhile, I’m free to tease myself with the pressure of possibility, riding the cleft of Louis’ ass. The air is humid with our breathing. Louis’ body clutching sweetly around me like a kiss. Like he’s sucking on the head of my dick with his mouth. He isn’t. Louis could very well strangle an orgasm out of me just from that feeling alone had I not found means to distract myself counting the contours of ribs so close to the skin.

“We should spend every weekend this way,” I say through clenched teeth, into the hard-pressed space between us-- the spring of scant, trailing hair leading to my infatuated dick and the sinuous curve of Louis’ hips. “Our forever honeymoon.”

“It would be irresponsible," he answers, "You have a purpose now.”

“Sometimes, I can’t tell if you’re attempting to flatter me,” I say. “Or discourage me from fucking you. Christ, Mother Theresa wouldn’t put up this much of a fight.” I don't wait for his response.

Louis blood surfaces under his unbroken skin to meet my open-mouthed kiss, skin more precious for having been destroyed. Skin like satin, like velvet, like something I fashioned from phosphorous and fire and the worst case of destrudo Freud would have ejaculated over. I swallow the compulsion to laugh, thinking of Freud. What would the old pervert have made of me, David and Merrick bleeding over Louis’ corpse in a miserable circle jerk of lust, longing, and dishonesty-- our very own vampiric take on Bukkake?

“I like when you're quiet,” I coo directly into the violet-colored hollow of Louis’ throat, and because I can’t help running my mouth, consequences be damned, I keep going: “I can imagine any sort of sweetness without your commentary. You’re perfect when you’re pliable and subdued. Submission is a good look for you.” Although coldly murderous is sexier, but I keep that to myself.

“Strange,” Louis counters, “You’re infinitely more tolerable when you’re servicing me with your mouth.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I chuckle. I kiss him, our teeth clicking together, slicing my tongue on its urgent trajectory to swell against his. He huffs a hush of air from his nostrils. His cupped hands rise to my chest, warmer than the cold air surrounding us, but not by much. His eyelashes tickle my face, fluttering down. I would be hellishly dizzy if I were at all dependent on oxygen.

Releasing his mouth, I grip his biceps should he attempt to squirm away. He hums softly around his mouthful of blood, head tipped back and hair pouring like dark liquid over white sheets. Clearly swooning, his lips part like a dreaming child’s, and he bites the tip of his tongue. It takes a moment to collect himself into bristling awareness, hell-cat eyes accusing.

I purse my lips at him and attempt not looking guilty. Tossing a diminutive, “I love you,” like an olive branch for manipulating him. I’m comfortable saying it under these circumstances as if there is no weight to it. Like my heart doesn’t skip beats, and my brain doesn’t malfunction when Louis is near. The saturnine stretch of Louis’ mouth is the Louis-equivalent of an unhappily twitching tail. It’s oh-so-hard not to want him when he’s furious or frustrated or flustered. Or breathing. Or not breathing. I’m not very picky when Louis is involved.

“With an army of admirers, you mean to tell me you have chosen me to give your heart to? Your worst companion ever?” Louis says in a way that reads true to anyone who isn’t me: that funny little half-smile full of self-deprecating tragedy, slow, like the unfurling of a leaf, the irony flooding his face to rosiness.

“Worst _husband_. The word is husband,” I interject annoyed. “Besides, you can’t hold my indiscretions against me forever. Especially for the times _you_ broke up with _me_. I could have gone to ground again without those so-called admirers you contemptibly throw in my face.”

A juicy tidbit Louis conveniently left out of his confession to Daniel--

The cagey bastard would rupture our relationship on a nightly basis. I’d learned early to ignore Louis’ self-righteous denunciations of my predatory behavior, his subsequent threats to leave me. We’d tussle, draw blood, and he’d sulk silently for weeks while I showed him exactly how much I didn’t care with fun I wasn’t having. Fighting, fucking, and brooding took up all of our time. That is until Claudia was born to us. I would have been irritated it had been she to tame Louis if I hadn’t benefited so directly. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to keep the peace, and I had a score four-years-long.

I add: “We may have been living under the same roof, but you shunned me like I was your mother. What else was I supposed to think, or do, for that matter?”

“Stopped lying to me, for one.” Louis lifts his head, pitch-blue strands shadowing his face. He attempts to shift out from underneath my larger, darker body. His biceps are hard and sinewy as steel cable in my grip, cords of muscle pull under his skin, and his fists contract like vulnerable hearts at his sides, unsure. The sliver of green in his eyes blink furtive hostility in morse code, and his glossy cheekbones catch the light.

“You made me the monster I am,” I say to Louis, filled with simmering rancor, “You wouldn’t accept me any other way. You were unfair. You never wanted the knight, only the dragon. I wanted you for my companion and my lover. You chose me to be your executioner, and when that failed, you set me up as your tormentor.” If nothing else, I would punish Louis with kisses, force our lips together, shove my tongue into his mouth, and steal the breath from his lungs. More so than ever, Louis is mine. I’d earned him rightfully several times over.

“Admit it--” my anger surprises me. “You hate loving me.”

He appraises me, seeking to deceive my notice with that inscrutable languor -- the distance between him and the door and the trajectory of my body if he were to buck me off the bed. “ _Hated_. Past tense. And yes, there were times when death was preferable to accepting I was in love with you,” he says.

The grin spreading over my face is slow, unfelt as if it belonged to a stranger. It’s more honesty than I ever hoped to receive from him; cause enough for a small celebration if it weren’t something I wouldn’t choose to hear. “How do you feel about it now?”

“Resigned,” he says gravely, without any gall. Sensing he’d gone too far, he palms my cheek and smiles, gently reassuring. “Not always. Sometimes I feel fortunate when I’m not feeling like an imposter. It’s not a reflection of you, but of myself. You have more faith in us than I do in me. If we fail, it will be my fault again. You’re the only one who’s unaware that what you feel is nostalgia for that other life, which only incidentally includes me because I share exactly half the burden of our pain.”

“Where do you get these stupid ideas? Armand? You just don’t get it, smart as you are-- It’s you. How am I not getting through? I want you. Here, now, every second. It’s uncomplicated. Maybe it’s that I’m too unsophisticated for you.” Tenderly, I press my thumb to his chin, part his lips with a slip of my tongue. “It boggles the mind to find that you’re as stupid as you are intelligent. You’re mystifying and an idiot, and I love you, you wretched, beautiful man.”

Covering him completely, I feel my way down with a hand to his hip, the thigh, the calf hoisted over the small of my back. Wonder where memories go as they’re lost in translation when they’re this perfect, and he’s so perfectly mine; when each dreamy pulse of my hips is a reach for his icy heart.

“Are you unsatisfied with me?” I ask differently. The question comes out harsher than I intended it to. Blast of anger at remembered betrayals, that awful lone, longing that led me again and again into the ready arms of yet another lover. “Is it that I’m not man enough for you?”

Louis’ jaw greets me like a formidable sheet of broken ice, hard and sharp. His mouth is a resolute seam, shut tight as though stitched together. His eyes narrow into flinty green chips, ambiguously poisonous. I kiss him fiercely as if I could sway him into submission, except he won’t open for it, won’t share breath. He smiles closed-lipped, incongruously, suspiciously flirtatious, a red herring to sweeten the deal before he knees me in the proverbial balls. We’ve been here before. An old game with old rules in new packaging.

“It’s a simple question, Louis. You have two answers.” I find the instep of Louis’ left foot, the lead up to the inner ankle-bone, the skin behind the knee, push it out and away from my hip, straining the tendons, up and into the mattress between Louis’ side and his elbow. There’s a hiss of air sucked through gritted teeth but no move to stop me, no command, no fight. Only that gaze following the line of his nose to me.

“I thought we’d grown out of this,” I say, sounding tired. Holding my cock by the root. I push and push. Go on pushing into submerged muscle. Louis is warmer there. Warmer than the temperature of our skin. I suppose we all are. That in us remains the existence of catabolic reactions at our core, proof of life’s perseverance after the change. If humans are incandescent bulbs, then vampires would be light-emitting diodes, more efficient, focused.

When I’m in, full-stop, I let fly the most blissful of sighs; smile no more than teeth and a smoke tendril of tenderness, wanton, and ill-timed. What I should have done was taken a slower, more considerate course of action. Instead, I fuck up as I always do in my anger. I saw the setup. And actively tossed caution to the wind to possess Louis. Because he will never deny me anything when it befits his subversive motives. He needs the moral high ground of pain, his price for pleasure and happiness when his life is contingent on the death of another. No matter how undeserving of life the victim may be.

Louis’ eyes shut, brokering no emotion, hand resting lightly on my shoulder, hesitant as a little bird.

“You’ve pulled the argument out from underneath me,” he says quietly, without releasing the tension dimpling the skin over his left eyebrow. Strong legs wrap around me. Too quick for me to register that Louis has moved at all, having slipped both arms under my armpits to wreathe the span of my back, trapping me in place. Every exhale into the atmosphere is followed by the constriction of Louis’ limbs.

“You’re in love with the idea of who you want me to be,” he says, nails cutting into my shoulder blades. The intercostal spaces of my ribs collapse into thin rings, letting me know in no uncertain terms that Louis is not one to roll over. “I’m waiting for the moment you realize it,” he finishes and surprisingly presents his mouth to me, relaxing arms and legs, just as he exhales into my lungs. I’m hungry it, reaching for his ass, nosing my face into the seductive, long curve of his neck, and thrusting into the declivity.

“ _Kiss me_ ,” he asks, like there might be a possibility of rejection (there never is even when there should be). His legs fall open to either side of my hips and rakes his fingers through my hair.

Grudgingly, I do. Deeply, because Louis' mouth invites that sort of sensual hunger, a desperate kind of needy violence. His tongue flutters and flickers: small and red and licking around the inside of my mouth like a flame, so hungry and whorish I could hardly reconcile the mouth working me over as Louis’. It’s fierce with the character of a last kiss. I hate the implication, at once.

Palm to his windpipe, I push him away, having something vital to share. “I want no more games, Louis. I’m as tired as you are, as broken by them. I mean it.” I suck at the skin of his neck, around the clutching shape of my hand, like I mean to break the surface. No reaction. At least none I will accept as favorable.

"Eternity is a long time,” Louis says, once I relax my hold. My eyes search his gaze -- seaweed-slippery, his mind a black sea. “Forced commitment only breeds your resentment. You have too much passion for devoting to one person, and I won’t have you hold it against me.”

“ _What_?” He may as well have thrown ice-water in my face, my loins, my heart. However, my dick remained ingloriously unaffected, poised, and shameless as a politician mid-lie.

“We have to be realistic about our relationship,” he continues with gentle savagery, tearing me to shreds with his beautiful mouth, no teeth necessary.

“Your pillow talk is atrocious,” I say, taken aback, fury renewed. “You're deliberately spoiling the mood. No wonder you were unmarried when I found you. And for your information, I have changed. Or the circumstances surrounding us have, and it makes all the difference.” I should pull out. It would serve him right. “Of course, you would do this to me the moment I commit.”

“Lestat, I’m giving you an option. I know you well enough to determine you will tire of me.”

“You bastard. You have someone in mind. Is it, Armand? It’s him, isn’t it? He touches you, and I will kill him.”

“No, you won’t, even if it were the case.”

“Let me get things straight. You’re giving me carte blanche to cheat? And what, you’re proposing to remain at home like a dutiful wifey warming my bed?”

“No,” so he says. The little beast. Cyril read him right the first time, better than anyone of us. There is no doubt of Louis’ pure form, exquisite but merciless.

I can hardly breathe. “Louis, you must remember to lie to me. You used to be so good at it.”

Louis doesn’t. “I had no choice.” The sixty-five-year-old implication clear as air.

“If you’re trying to kill my erection, it won’t work.”

“You’re surrounded by old and potential lovers,” he continues, as if I hadn’t spoken, or like he memorized it from cue cards. You can’t help being who you are. Physical intimacy is as natural as breathing for you, and now it's more than that. It’s a necessary evil-- although you may see it differently. I understand it’s meant to strengthen our alliances, and that desire is a better motivator than fear is.”

“But my way is not your way. You give your heart away with your ass,” It’s a sorry attempt at humor, and unsurprisingly it’s met with a silent stony-face, so I continue: “You can’t separate love from sex.”

“How would you know that? I don’t even know that for myself, and you’ve never allowed me the space to try.”

“You had your chance, and Merrick broke you! She fucking broke you, you ungrateful, lying son-of-a-cunt!”

He startles. “Get off,” he pushes at me, shoves hard at my chest, legs kicked out to the sides at first, then hook over my calves, ripping the hair off with his heels in the struggle. His strength surprises me. It shouldn't, but it does. His jaw twitches in frustration, movement whittling down to mindless wiggles when he gets nowhere and looks up at me through his eyelashes in peeved defeat.

“I won’t share you. Not now or ever.” The ease and certainty of the delivery catches me off guard, evidence of my instability, I suppose. For all of a single heartbeat, I consider the repercussions of going back on my word and bending Louis over my knee to lay into him with my hand, so it hurts us both. But the lasting consequences outweigh the pleasure of instant gratification, so I opt for Plan B. Fuck the unholy spirit out of Louis then continue the argument post-coitus.

“Louis,” I nibble his ear, aiming to charm him or shut him up, which is just as well. “You talk too much. Let me fuck you. You will. Won’t you?” My tongue darts out from between my teeth to touch his racing pulse, and I aim my straining dick over the small aperture, pushing, teasing.

“So let me put it in you,” I reason, wanting to take my time and hurry up in equal measure. Wanting to tangle our hands together as Louis writhes and wriggles in my lap. Wanting his knees over my shoulders and his heels urging me deeper and harder, his throat clicking around my name, refusing to sing. Or wanting him on hands and knees in front of me, holding him open with my tongue and my thumbs until he’s begging for cock. It should be my cock specifically, but the turn of conversation has supplanted my fantasy self by a faceless stranger.

I frown. The mere suggestion of someone replacing me, leaving behind an imprint of their body on Louis, is seriously upsetting. I wouldn’t know how to go about defining the careful plotting of a massacre. Massacre implies frenzy and chaos. What I’m talking about is cold and calculated. I would invite everyone to an event, lock them in, interrogate each guest into revealing contenders for Louis’ favor. Then I would set about systematically tearing out said-contenders’ hearts bare-handed. But only after removing the eyes for coveting what’s mine. Making an example of my domestic enemies would discourage any others.

I don’t wait for him to adjust, and if I’m rougher than I mean to be with him, he doesn’t move to stop me. He affords me a few well-planted thrusts before he flips us, the sudden movement releasing my dick into the crisp air, heavy with the pulse of blood.

“We need is more lubricant,” he near whispers, eyelashes casting shadows on the high curve of his cheeks, the sly tilt of his eyes lovely in the half-light, hair curling in whorish tangles around his face. I may be more than a tad irate with him for being the apotheosis of perfect sex appeal while seeming to morbidly deny any curiosity for sexual matters only to insist on practicing polygamy because I can’t keep it in my pants.

“Are we . . .” I watch his lower lip disappear into his mouth, and his ears turn a delicious shade of mortified mauve “--out?” And, then, I’m consumed with the impulse to pry his pretty mouth open with my tongue as much as I want to force my way inside him to prove a petty point. Mainly that he’s mine. He lost all rights to himself the moment he self-immolated.

“Of course not.”

Instead, I reach for the economy-sized bottle of lubricant I keep tenuously hidden under my bed pillow, well within groping distance since our blundered experiment with Fareed’s hormone injections left me with an infernal concupiscence unknown to me since I’d been a mortal boy and found out what my dick was for.

The noise of the pump mechanism has Louis hiding his face behind both hands, unable to take cover when he’s sitting on my lap, which is a step up from the time he tried to suffocate himself with a pillow, or another when he spun himself around in a comforter, making of himself a mortified, murderous burrito.

“You can’t even look at it, can you? How do you expect me to take your entreaties to tap my ass seriously when you blush at the mere suggestion of the word lube?” I say with none of the levity I was aiming for.

My face aches from keeping it on the spectrum between somber and severe, a sibylline mask for all the sloppy, undefined, crazy-making feelings he provokes in me. “Tonight, you will come on my dick alone or not at all.”

“Why not admit that you’re punishing me for being honest with you. Because I don’t see how you will manage that particular miracle!” Louis says with no hint of a smile, eyes slitting in that uniquely terrifying yet inflaming way of his. Lesser men would lose their erection. I grow harder. “It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve deprived me of an orgasm.”

In my hands, the silky fluid transforms into high shine gloss. I motion for Louis to lean back on his hands and plant his feet on either side of me in a crab crawl, raising his ass over my lap, suspending it over my cock and sweeping careful fingers over the exposed little hole, smearing lubricant around the tender, pink rim, rubbing circles until it softens around my thumb.

Hands down, Louis-on-top outflanks all other sexual positions for me. And not because little effort is required on my part, but because he’s so transparent when he’s unable to hide the feverish brilliance to his eyes, the fitful bounce of his dick leaving wet smears on my skin. At some point, the scale will tip, and Louis forgets he’s on display. Louis' knees would slide further apart. Would fondle my chest lazily with hands or tongue. Would lean back, straining and sweaty, hip-bones sliding forward and backward along the full length of my cock. Would entrust me with the privilege of jacking him as fast or as slow as I want. He might lift the weight of his balls to confirm to my eyes, that yes, he’s fully seated. And yes, I’m securely embraced.

He’s quiet, flushing beautifully and looking deceitfully conquered with his bitten lips and restless gaze skipping over mine, even as he rocks his hips in slight, negligible movements, fucking himself to the first knuckle of my thumb.

I feel the merciless throb of desire for him diffuse all over my body, radiating from my cock. My teeth ache for him, hungry for Louis’ eyes on me, fierce eyes that had unwittingly and unknowingly seduced me from Day One, Ground Zero.

“More,” I say, adding fingers to thumb. It’s easy, pushing in, slicking Louis up properly. His toes curl and his biceps quiver, but he’s wordless, and his gaze is restless. Concentration writ shallow lines over his brow and his mouth flowers into a lush, little “oh” of surprise, toes stretching.

Idly pulsing my besotted hips between his heartless thighs through his silence, my objective takes shape. Louis is to learn his place and know what I know that he is as much a hostage of longing and lust as I am. That we are both victims to the immense, irremediable thing between us and it would be to our significant advantage to ally ourselves against the real enemy-- the shroud of ice he’s covered himself with since the death of our daughter.

“Ring your arms around my neck and circle my waist with your legs,” I say, “I intend to lift you up.” Knowing well I meant business, he acts without further prompting, clinging deliciously with his ankles crossed over my buttocks and his biceps hugging my neck, our cheeks pressed together.

The Ormolu mirror is taller than I am, beveled, rectangle-shaped, and leaning against the East wall next to my wardrobe. With both hands on his buttocks, I lift him up until my cock slips out into the cold air. Free to stand, he takes one unsteady step back and meets my hungry eyes with insecurity and a hand over my solar plexus. I turn him around by the hips, press his back to my chest. Rest my chin over his shoulder to gaze at his reflection in the mirror. The realization is immediate. No longer demure, he scowls.

“What is it?” I say, watching the blush shift all over his skin, rising darkly as though I’d slapped him. “Out of all the things I’ve done to you, this is what you would say no to?”

“I haven’t said anything.” The baritone of his voice as soul-deep as his beauty.

“You don’t have to. I see your distaste.” It’s true what he says about mirrors. He never looks into them with a free eye. Whatever he sees, is far from what the rest of us do.

“How do you want me?” he says, matter-of-fact, as if to prove me wrong, letting me know in no uncertain terms he is the one calling the shots by allowing me this.

I can play by ear. “Spread your legs, bend at the hip, a little, but keep your head up, I want to see your face.”

He acknowledges nothing, doing my bidding with unwavering grace, yielding without surrendering, mocking me by taking it a step further and holding his cheeks apart with his hands, fingers in a spider-sprawl. It sends all the aching fullness of my blood racing to my lips, my dick, my belly. Nothing could be done to disguise something as powerful, as crude, as raw as what Louis does to me.

It takes everything in me to hesitate, to freeze my hips in place and take in the moment: The panoptic view of my lumbering shadow looming over the narrow wake of a supple back so defined it became a lesson in anatomy. But it’s the sight of the devil’s phantom fingerprints mirrored on either side of Louis’ subtle spine, demarking the unjustifiably exquisite shape of his buttocks that breaks my resolve.

Dragging my nails over his flanks, I savagely pull him into my body, the percussive smack of his ass against my hips jars us both, bone-deep. But it was the knowledgeable aim of my desire that has me seeing stars by the just-barely-fit that speaks of design and wedding bands and destiny.

If I die now, I would not mind. Not even a little.

_“Connard.”_

“Your fault--,” I gasp, suppressing a giggle fit by holding my breath for all of five seconds. Touching my forehead to the top of Louis’ spine, I conceal the dimples there with my thumbs, “--for being helpful. Don’t be helpful.”

 _“Idiot,”_ he grouses, angles his head over his shoulder to peer at me, and for one second, he’s all narrow eyes and pointy elbows and peach-round ass, and I’m quaking for reasons unrelated to fear.

“For you, yes, absolutely your idiot,” Repressed laughter could be heard in my voice though, directed into his sweat-shiny skin. “It’s your fault. You were too helpful, Louis.” I lay an open hand on a buttock, consider its shapeliness, my browned skin dark enough to look backlit against the icy shimmer of his own. “Stop being helpful.”

“Are you _laughing_?”

“No.” My heart flutters with the dread of banishment, tongue feeling strangely too big in my mouth. “Yes . . . Maybe?” I want to draw him up against my torso, look at the sliver of his mirrored body nested sweetly and perfectly into mine, but it would reveal the exultant triumph in my expression, the vain glee no award-winning actor could hope to disguise, not after such a hard-fought victory.

“Will you be moving anytime soon?” Louis says breathlessly, if a little nettled, into the hush.

“Give me a minute.”

Louis doesn’t. He rolls his shoulders back -- straightens and tosses his hair so that for one precarious moment I think he’s about to headbutt my face -- but stops short, a hair’s breadth away from my nose, and steadies himself with a hand on my hip, trembling and shifting his weight from foot to foot.

He rocks forward in shudders, sliding off the length of my dick, until nothing but the tip and a prayer in the sanctuary of his body. A body that was more mine now than even my own. I wrap an arm around his middle, anchoring myself before thrusting into him, his ribs expanding in the circle of my embrace as I filled him so absolutely I must have rearranged his organs around my dick.

No one told me satisfaction could manifest such agony, such harrowing devotion, that every second in the company of the beloved has the simultaneous capability for devastating bliss or exquisite torture. At times it was too much for me, desire riding me with shivering pleasure, and not enough for him, his fingertips gripping my flanks so hard it blanched the skin underneath. Only to switch, finding myself encircling the slenderness of his waist with my two hands and violently snapping our bodies together, and he’d rock forward onto the balls of his feet as though prepared to sprint, putting centimeters of added height between us, which wouldn’t do.

“If we lose our balance and I land on my face, I will kill you,” Louis says between one thrust and the next, my mouth watering as I suck bloodless kisses on his neck, thinking I could taste myself in the salt of his sweat. “I mean it. Lestat,” he growls after a significantly well-planted thrust.

“Don’t worry,” I kiss the side of his face, the luster of his hair haloed in blue like a raven’s wing. “I’ll hold you to me. Look at me.” Hair falling seductively over one kitten-cornered eye, he meets my regard apprehensively. Mirror hiding nothing. Offering neither one of us the protection needed to love each other without suffering.

“Watch my hands,” it comes out less like an order and more like a plea because he’s doing it again. Taking control of me as he had the first night when I all but tripped over him: a foul-mouthed beauty surpassing even the freshest coquettes in the most elegant cabarets one star-crossed evening when I arrived on the wings of pure optimism and a mending heart.

Eyes lidded, he watches the crawl of my hand over his belly, his chest, the exposed throat with the same unfocused intensity that overcomes him sometimes when I fuck him. Unaware of what it means to possess such power or how to wield it to his benefit. The range of expression on Louis’ face is provocative in itself. It varies with mood, from capricious ingenue to blissful saint, to a sort of adolescent indifference, a surly sensuality that is both sexy and deeply insulting. Marked by an uplifted brow and a mouth posed on the brink of sarcastic remark, contradicted by the blood under his skin and the restless movement of a body in love with its own motion, indicating the depth of my skill.

I marvel. Ghost slipping past my lips in tiny flutters to match the crushing pressure below. Mesmerized by the blood-flush of pleasure mapping a watercolor landscape over the places our bodies touch, as though Louis' blood, can’t help rising to greet me, recognizing its master even when Louis refuses to.

One unfortunate result of blood-drinking is due to the nature of sealing oneself to the wound, it doesn’t allow the opportunity to witness a victim in their last throes. Lost is the symphony of gesture and expression, which can be eerily similar to the little death. Most of the time, as in ninety-nine percent, it’s hardly an afterthought.

I’ve fucked Louis in a million and one ways, but it’s the voyeuristic positions I enjoy most, looking down the long muscular line of my body to where it disappears into Louis’, filling my eyes with as much of him as I’m feasibly able to. And although he doesn’t feel the same, obviously feeling overly exposed and under scrutiny, he indulges me when the only other option I will allow is for him to sit on my face.

Louis will lie supine, shoulders squared, bent-kneed, fists knotted in the sheets underneath those wide-open thighs -- obviously schooling his demeanor into a vision of temperance. Not saying anything, not doing anything except panting and taking my dick. Betrayed by the color rising and falling underneath his smooth skin, the tops of his thighs, the barely-there waist. Unable or unwilling to deny me anything. And I will see the annoyance there. The impatience with himself, the embarrassed lip biting at every blurt of moisture from his untouched dick, bouncing a wet counterpoint to my enthusiastic fucking.

The two of us framed in ormolu like a tactile painting is better than that. I saw as much with my fingers as with my eyes. No brush between the artist and subject, no words, merely the stroke, the solid lines converging into one another, from seen to unseen and seen again. Louis' body is luminous against the tawny shadow of my own. His hair is a Gorgon’s tangle, the fatal splendor of his eyes meeting mine in the mirror. I shiver with a jolt of pure adrenaline, his upper arms cold and hard as iron in my grip as I leverage myself, angling back just as Louis bends, lips parted, the subtle length of his eye-teeth gleaming.

The invisible insolence, that strange dreamlike quality that carries him through life, unscathed by love, provoking me with the compulsion to punish him, to mark him, to ride him hard and fast straight into the ground. The sunset light of an antipathetic blush suffusing his dewy cheeks, his gleaming shoulders, the proud cock swinging up and down, belly to the thigh from the momentum carried forward from my hips to the tight ring of muscle contracting around me deep and delicious, to the glistening head of his marvelous dick.

I pull him into me, lips touching his ear. “You can’t say you don’t love the irony of us,” I whisper. “That my ferocity doesn’t suit you. It’s why you’re here with me and not with Armand.” He jerks, air whistling between his teeth on an exhale, my words a polished knife sliding into him, and he writhes hips like I burn him.

_“Oh, did I touch a nerve?”_

He looks at me through lowered eyelashes to hide the eye roll. His mouth stretched smooth and taut as the glossy rind of overripe fruit, as likely to recite poetry as to drain one of one’s life, twitches wryly at the corner, not quite bemusement. A brief moment long enough for me to comprehend what is meant when the Furies are addressed as the Eumenides. The Kindly Ones.

“I understand you,” I continue, the feeling in me too wild, all-consuming, the dark magic of blood and sex and binding: all the terrible things I did to him to save him from his poor life choices.

“I do,” I say again. Daring to caress Louis' flank. My hand rising like a shadow over his ribs as if to cradle his heart. Or cage it. “Even if you refuse to believe it. There is nothing about you that is faint-hearted, no matter what you say or want others to think.”

He huffs, neither confirming nor denying the truth. Because there is but one, and not one left to interpretation. The blood -- my blood -- illuminates him from within like a glowing forge. Big, mutinous eyes peered into mine as if from a great distance -- holding me no closer than at arm’s length and not the proximity of Love’s blurred boundaries where I’ve made a home underneath his skin.

The slight part between his thighs, purely for the benefit of my dick, bestowed him the indecent appearance of bow leggedness. Driving me absolutely nuts, seeming all-important to have him submit to the inescapability of my desire and his susceptibility to my caresses.

Misplacing my sanity, I say: “You’re a rare creature worthy only of the most exacting handler.” As accusations go, I’ve done worse with less to insult him, which ensures me nothing, not even a place in his bed or at his feet.

“You’ve barreled over the whims of weaker fools with your pretty words and prettier manners. You forget I’ve seen you wither men. And women. It’s strength you respect, commitment to action, a will to match your own. Look how hard you are--” I could almost swear the pleasure I take from declaring his present state to his pink-cheeked mirror-image is as knee-meltingly good as our fucking.

I watch him bow his head in the reflection, hair sliding over his eyes to avoid mine. Seizing his jaw, I press our smooth cheeks together side by side, our hips slotting closer, still with a grace of movement as natural as gravity. Seeing in myself the disquieting expression of a man at the brink of revelation whom no experience eludes, however base.

“How honest your body is,” I continue with neutrality I don’t feel. “How your skin glows. Your eyes are never darker than when you are with me -- more pupil than iris.” The curl of his fingers scratch high up on my hips, gathering for himself my clenched buttocks, goading me deeper as though I could drive out his demons with my pistoning dick.

Captivated by the heightened color in his cheeks, I grip the peach-velvet of Louis’ scrotum, eye the unyielding swing of his majestic cock. Much too full to do anything except bob and weave pitifully, spilling droplets of moisture, nectar. His eyes narrow, lower lip in his mouth, slowly releasing over the drag of his teeth in bloody, lovely ribbons as I watch.

“In my bed, in my arms, under my will, your passion is exalted, not diminished. You can’t deceive me anymore, Louis. Or yourself. You may not consider your reflection, but the mirror sees you just the same. I see you, Louis.”

We make a lovely portrait, he and I, an advertisement for debauchery. Every muscle in Louis primed for action, neck exposed to my eyes, and rivulets of sweat snake over my forearm locked around his waist, my body framing his in the mirror, and my hair lit up yellow and white against the unbroken wilderness of his own. At a glance, we appear as photo-negatives of each other, not so much jagged edges as puzzle pieces slotted together. It’s a heavenly rippling pleasure rutting into him with shallow, undulating pulses, unable or unwilling to part with the claiming pressure of his body taking me in.

“Look at you. You want this. Say you want me.” I’d started off on the wrong foot with Louis, and it took decades to make heads or tails of us because of it. However, it takes only seconds to regress and nullify any progress we’ve made as a couple in the past few months. “You’re mine, and you will do well to remember it.”

“I don’t know why you persist with pretense,” I pant hotly, into his ear, cradling a hand under his jaw, turning his head toward the mirror, and tipping it back. His haughty gaze cuts to mine then away, evasive with the emotion I would no doubt find there.

I run my hands possessively over his chest, his stomach, girdling the cinch of his waist in my hands, then pressing splayed fingers directly above the root of his sex, thinking, stunned, that behind my palm, I’m inside Louis and those breathy, punched exhalations misting up the dark are because of me. I would know Louis anywhere, deaf, dumb, and be-hoodied, I’d know the shape and texture of Louis.

“You know what you’re doing,” I sigh, burning up from love and irritation. The fact remains that as asinine as I can be, I’m infinitely more emotionally intelligent than my lover. “Everything is considered . . . You miss nothing, Louis. You never have.” I say, repeatedly pausing, short-winded as I am from the smooth squeezing flight of his body traveling forward, then returning homeward along the length of my cock and the barely-there touch of my nipples skimming over the sweat on his back.

“It’s your strength -- hmm, and your weakness -- ahh,” I grimace into his cheek, my teeth to his salty skin, pulling his intransigent hips with sly hands and holding his buttocks in place, flush against my lap, so as to hiss into his ear: “You read too much into my actions when ninety-nine percent of the time I act without forethought. You forget my father was a chess player, not I.”

His reflection glares at me with inconsolable eyes like river-stones. “You don’t want me,” he scoffs, a verbal brush off, cold and cruel creature that he is. “It’s the chase you desire. And as long as I resist, you will keep pace, but the second I stop running, you will disappear again.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lie through my teeth, moving inside of him. Each rancorous thrust, taking on an unpredictable character, fierce and gentle, frenzied in turns. Just so. In that way. That angle that has Louis pre-spending -- a drop here, another there -- and gasping in gulps. His hands encircling my wrists as I grip his flanks, and he rises to his toes to escape the sting of penetration, the shameful thunderclap of flesh.

“I’m an _idiot_ to love you,” Louis says in a heated torrent, twisting his head, his voice strained to raw sugar roughness. Arching his back, his hand reaches to clasp the back of my neck as he continues, just above a whisper: “But, I’m not entirely beyond redemption, since I hate you just as much.”

His long fingers tangle in my hair as he blindly nuzzles into my jaw, leading my smiling mouth to his venomous one, and licking along my lower lip. There is a flicker of movement against my palm when he swallows. The room echoing with the susurrous noise of our animal panting and the slick unmistakable sounds of sex. The knobs of his ankles bruising the inside of my calves. His body like a noose around my dick, a leash to the gallows.

“Say it,” I say, rubbing circles with my thumb against the pulse point below his ear. “Say you want this as much as I do. Acknowledge you’re mine.”

“I am no more yours than you are mine,” Louis mocks. “And if you think I’m here to stroke your ego, you’re better off with Gregory,” and rolls his hips back as if to say he would rather stroke me in a different way.

He guides my hand from hip to throat, squeezing just so. The implications are clear, but my head is not. There is an inordinate amount of noise despite the pleasure I’m succumbing to, and it angers me. I grunt from the impact when I haul him to me. Tightening my grip over his windpipe, his breathing comes in soft, puppy pants.

Louis has no reason to remember why I hate this. Can’t recognize the devastation writ over the face. The subterranean darkness in my eyes, my gleaming mouth full of murder. Vertebra shift and creak under my thumb. His shoulder blades pinch together against my chest. My remaining arm is iron-barring his midsection, and he’s writhing impotently. And it’s a little like the night I gave him the dark gift, save the fact that I was now strangling him, not covering his mouth, not draining his life.

Louis’ face is intoxication-pink, and his slackening lips a deeper crimson. He goes languid from the interrupted blood flow to his brain, then still, finally. Nearly sick with the growing anxiety in my belly, I let go of his neck. His head lolls backward on my shoulder as though broken, arms and legs like long, wilted stems. I couldn't bear seeing him that way.

At once, he jerks. His elbow impacts my ribs, and I drop him on hands and knees, holding my side and backing away as he hiccups, or laughs, a little out of sorts, utterly wrecked, like he’d crawled out of a vehicle accident to find himself, the sole survivor. Breathing heavily, he rears up to sit on his heels, straight-spined, spread-kneed, quizzically looking over his shoulder with dilated eyes in my direction, his blissful smile seeming faintly sinister in its unfamiliarity.

“What have you gotten up to in my absence?” I asked, struck by the realization that Louis and I have spent more time apart than together. And that this reckless man on his knees for me, with the narrowed stare and elusive mind, is a mystery worth fearing. Absurdly, I’m deeply shaken, unable to find my wind. Unwilling to reconcile the splintered dissonance with the epiphany.

I don’t recognize him, a feral being I crafted from nothing, blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, capable of anything.

“I keep having these. . .” his voice crackles like I’d fucked his throat, “--these recurrent dreams,” he continues as though it explains everything. “I was somewhat. . . curious.”

“You had me choke you to what end?” I ask, knowing precisely what Louis had subconsciously assimilated years back, but needing the confirmation spoken aloud where it can’t be taken back. When none was forthcoming, I look around and find splatters of evidence glistening on the rug.

“I see.” More than Louis realizes.

Rising from the floor, he cuts a striking figure, having the incisive lines and prominent blood vessels of the exceptionally lean. Oblivious of his power, he sweeps the hair from his eyes by raking his fingers through it, tucking the black mass behind his ears, which did nothing to tame its incredible disorder, the damp having sprung each whimsical wave into self-contained curls, which is more or less the difference between shoulder and chin length.

He sees me now, and his eyes are ice and liquor, chartreuse in fine crystal. Instinct would have me run for cover, but love has me fettered to the floor. His exhale is heart-heavy with the sort of gravity only Louis can shoulder.

I don’t know what it is he sees in my face, but it has me taking a step back with an urge to hit something. Caught in vertigo, it feels like I’m nodding my head at something nonsensical and too distant to hear. My hand grasps, then pushes, too numb to register pressure. I think I’m dying, my blood spills out of me. Louis grabs me by the elbows and draws me up directly in front of him, shaking me so forcefully my head swings from the whiplash.

“Lestat,” he says, with all the authority of a king. “Lestat, listen to me. Breathe,” which is an odd command given how unnecessary it is for us, except once I allow my diaphragm to contract, the asphyxiating pressure disappears.

“Look at me,” he says, and I do without question. Retracing the sublime symmetry, which defies memory and mortality, and has brought about one moral cataclysm after another. Up close, his face is no less full of mystery, has altered the way I see the world. The lens through which everything is brought into sharp focus, especially my shortcomings. It feels so much like confronting my own evil. I think I moan from the brutal anxiety.

“No,” he says, sternly. Hands framing my face, thumbs sweeping over my cheeks. “Look at me.” He studies me, filled with more care than I deserve. His expression is tender with regret or exhaustion.

“We’re fine. You are fine,” Louis says as if his words were law.

Everything in me rebels, because we’re not okay. Not with secrets trapped inside, I feel them with the certainty some children believe themselves to be adopted.

A slender hand cups my cheek, the sheeny silk of his lips, little more than a current of air, graze mine. There is less give with his velvet tongue, the light lick at the corners of my mouth, where tears have tracked, collect in a well for Louis to sip with lips as red as Chinese lanterns, and twice as lucky.

He draws close, a hand on the small of my back; mine to the back of his neck, hair and fingers in tangles; a collision of mouths, soft and murderous in turns. I push into him with the flat of my tongue. Recovery taking nothing at all: nothing but the gentle sweep of the tongue over his lower lip, the suck of his kiss, and the discovery that I’ve never tasted anything more wonderful. My tongue cuts on his teeth, blood leaving me in a subdued rush as I feed him from my mouth. Soothed by the hungry movement of it working mine. Foolish to believe that I would have been unselfish enough to leave him to Armand.

Overwhelmed with love, fit to bursting with it, I’m reluctant to let go when he pushes me. Takes a half-step back, his palm over my heart, his gaze holding mine. I think I know what he means to do before he does it, but even as he slides -- down, down, down -- to steady knees, knees that spread, or strangle, or break bones, I think I’m hallucinating, hypnotized. Which wouldn’t be the first time.

I groan, blood flooding out to my extremities, hair rising in a prickle all over my body. The light finds the sleepless, strontium pallor of skin stretched over bone and muscle, the taut rounds of his cheeks so unyielding I expect to hear a tangible sound like a crystal glass in treble clef, vibrating to the dimly heard note of my heart, should I drag my fingertips over it.

There are no words, and even if there were, I can’t say anything around the hopeful lump in my throat. Perhaps I don’t have to. I can’t tell what could be wetter, his bottom lip, or the tip of my dick if the pearl there is dew or evidence of desire.

His hands, having never left my body, slot thumbs into the grooves of my hips. His breath disturbs the tawny dusting of short hair around the scrotum. He mouths sidelong kisses in a trail from the root to crown. Lapping it and smiling with his eyes, watching my reaction as though he does this sort of thing for me all the time. Like I hadn’t just fucked him with it, or he doesn’t care as long as it’s me and my voice shouting, stunned, and stupid and uneven as a death-gasp.

He flutters his tongue, cradles the contours of my cock. Guides it directly into the perfect constricting movement of his swallow. And the humiliating whine -- bright and shivery and soaring into the darkroom is puppy-dog without a bone. The vampire Lestat brought to heel, muzzled.

My heart rattles under my breastplate, a tacky love song in pop as he shakes me loose. Pushing and pulling by the flanks. His brows knit together as he struggles not to cut me. The girth is challenging enough on its own, even with the generous clinch of lips around my length.

“I don’t mind,” I say because I don’t. “I don’t mind teeth. . . Just-- _Oh_."

Thought derails when Louis fucks his mouth on me, cock to the bend in his throat. I'm too much to handle, but he sucks me down like I’m precisely the known quantity he needs me to be.

Tears spring to his eyes. It’s a small mercy when he shuts them. I could have died from exposure, irradiated, and blistered by their laser focus. Or perhaps from overdose. Green is toxic in high quantities, like chartreuse, like absinthe, like the arsenic-dyed taffeta. But more than heart-stopping addiction, Louis is a vow in blood.

It’s quite possibly the dirtiest thing he has ever done. At least intellectually. And he’s doing it for me and to me. Still, he would not choke, would not relent. Would dissolve me on his tongue, works me over like he has all the time in the world for me to shrivel up in his mouth. I hiss around the phantom graze of kitten teeth kissing welts along the length. His mouth becoming a molten elemental shape conspiring to inflame me. Every cell, every atom alight, abuzz. Blood moving through me. Again and again into the dark curl of his throat, like a wave collapsing upon itself.

He keeps me at the razor edge of numinous release until I’m begging, and my knees go unsteady, buttressed by him, his hands kneading my buttocks. When I come, it thrills with a rhythmic pulse.

"Don't say a word," he says, gasping. "Not one word."

And for the first time, as I fall to my knees in front of him, laughing from joy, I don't, because I'm too busy chasing his dirty mouth with mine.

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as a birthday gift for Cesare. My aim was 2k of sexiness and arguing then it quickly ballooned into whatever this is. This has been 5 months coming. Happy super-belated Birthday.
> 
> Thank you, thank you, thank you to Cesare, Cyg, Reb, and Burnadette, whose handholding has been essential to my insecure muse. I'm serious. They're too awesome for words.
> 
> Some things I should address: Lestat kissing Magnus' ghost is really a _thing_ that _happened_ in _Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis_ right along with Amel calling Lestat a slut. Lestat did visit a cave of cavorting Lesbian vampires bathing in a hot-spring and upon seeing Lestat decided to bathe him instead (Prince Lestat). I can't take credit for any of those. Or the fact that Lestat " _knows almost nothing personally about [his] feet_ " (Blood Canticle? Blackwood Farm?) . . . I would wait to buy the novels when they're two for a dollar at your used bookshop. If plot holes and absurdities drive you bonkers, or you expect Anne's later novels to be anything like her first three. . . don't pick them up . . . 
> 
> Unless you intend to use them as fodder for your fanfiction. Then please do. At this point, Fanfiction is doing AR's intellectual property a favor. The shade is well-deserved. Mater has a history of bullying fanfic writers. I think she's turned a new leaf after what Twilight has done for Stephanie Meyer. 
> 
> I make no money from this nor do I intend ever to make profit from writing in general (fiction and nonfiction). I'm not a writer, which is why you don't see any original characters here. This is something I do for fun and kudos. I borrow someone's intellectual property out of nostalgia and make up dirty fantasies. Thank you so much for reading! Leave a kudo if you enjoy it.


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